need upgrade for IB Connectivity

[bigtee]

Today I received a msg from IB stating
"In a continued effort to enhance the resilience of our trading infrastructure, we are providing an upgrade to our desktop TWS platform today that would enable additional protection against the kind of highly publicized Internet attack that occurred on October 21, 2016, in which Interactive Brokers was not affected.

If a similar attack were to affect TWS connectivity to Interactive Brokers, we would activate the protection to allow your TWS to attempt to work around the disruption. In order to receive this protection, please install or upgrade to TWS, TWS Latest or TWS Beta."

Ninja 7 users can not take advantage of this increased security from IB because the currently supported version is 957,x whereas the IB version referenced above is 960.x.

When can we expect NInja to support the much newer TWS with this important security upgrade?

bigtee

[NinjaTrader_PatrickG]

There are no changes expected for the supported version of Traders Work Station with NinjaTrader 7 as all of our development efforts are focused on NinjaTrader 8.

When possible, we update our supported version of Traders Work Station at regular intervals with each new NinjaTrader 8 release. Due to the number of releases Interactive Brokers has, we may be behind their current release simply because we may not update our platform at the same time they do.

[bigtee]

I understand that you can not keep up with all TWS releases, and that is generally o.k. by me. However moving to v8 does not solve the problem either. The current release supported by v8 is TWS 954... I would think that Ninja would want to keep current with releases that solve security issues, like the newer IB one does. That is more important to a trader than any feature issues.

When do you plan to support a newer release of TWS with the security fix in Ninja v8?

By the way, I would think that the Ninja Brokerage also has the need for a security fix like TWS is implementing. Is that correct?

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Right now the priority is to get NinjaTrader 8 released. Once we get through our general release then we would then be looking into a TWS API update.

As far as your comments towards NinjaTrader Brokerage, I've forwarded your comment. We deal strictly with the platform side of things on these forums. Its an interesting idea one that does not come without its drawbacks. Not in a position where I could comment further on that but the feedback is received.

-Brett

[bigtee]

Let's revisit an update for v7 for a different reason. Here is the problem. v8 is not a production release, so I can not use it for live trading. It is even a problem to begin checking it out, which I would like to do, because v8 uses a different version of TWS than v7. It would be nice if v7 supported the same version of TWS as v8 so we could switch back and forth.

The problem gets a little more complicated as I was talking with IB today and they indicated that the version v7 supports would probably get phased out soon as obsolete. This will potentially leave us waking up one day and discovering we no longer can trade. Huge problem, and not consistent with Ninja comittment to support v7.

So how about updating v7 to support the same TWS version as v8 currently does? That would allow us to debug v8 while still running v7 for actual trading. It would also buy considerable time before the TWS supported version gets phased out.

[NinjaTrader_Brandon]

Hello bigtee,
Thanks for your reply.
If you would like to use NinjaTrader 7 and NinjaTrader 8 on the same system, you can use IB Gateway for NinjaTrader 8 and Traders Workstation 944.3 for NinjaTrader 7. IB Gateway support is a new feature with NinjaTrader 8. See the connection guide below.

http://ninjatrader.com/ConnectionGuides/Interactive-Brokers-Connection-Guide

We spoke with Interactive Brokers recently, as it is typically near the year end they discontinue allowing users to connect with a Traders Workstation below a certain build. They informed us they updated this to requiring 939. At this time there is no concern of 944.3 no longer working.

[Harry]

I was contacted by Interactive Brokers for my live account to switch to one of the latest releases for safety reasons to avoid disruption in case of internet attacks. Here is the original text:

"Dear Client,

In a continued effort to enhance the resilience of our trading infrastructure, we are providing an upgrade to our desktop TWS platform today that would enable additional protection against the kind of highly publicized Internet attack that occurred on October 21, 2016, in which Interactive Brokers was not affected.

If a similar attack were to affect TWS connectivity to Interactive Brokers, we would activate the protection to allow your TWS to attempt to work around the disruption. In order to receive this protection, please install or upgrade to TWS, TWS Latest or TWS Beta."

The three cited versions are 952.3a, 960.2a, 961.0a.

For NinjaTrader 7 I am still stuck with release 944.3. This release is now two and a half years old. I do understand that you cannot always upgrade NinjaTrader to work with the latest release of TWS, but running two and a half years behind seems to be a bit exaggerated.

Could you please update NinjaTrader 7 to work with a later version of TWS?

[NinjaTrader_Brandon]

Hello Harry,
Thanks for your reply.
Once we get NinjaTrader 8 released (which is coming soon), we will then look into updating the supported version of Traders Workstation.
Thanks for letting us know of the Interactive Brokers communication.